Martha Hodes wins $50,000 Lincoln prize

“Mourning Lincoln,” the historian Martha Hodes’s account of how ordinary Americans lamented (or celebrated) the assassination of the Great Emancipator, has won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which is awarded annually by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The prize, for “the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, carries a $50,000 cash award.

In the book, which was published by Yale University Press, Ms. Hodes drew on diaries, letters and other writings by ordinary citizens — black and white, Northern and Southern — from the spring and summer of 1865. The prize jury called it “a stunning and enlightening work that underscores the rage that Lincoln’s assassination fueled, the outpouring of grief that resulted, and how the anger and confusion that boiled across the country that summer influenced the failures of Reconstruction.” ...